It would feel quite odd to give a review of my own work as I tend to do before all ICWS Online posts, instead I have opted to give a very brief introduction: this poem aimed to bring together ideas of inheritance, both of the mind and the body. As a personal reflection it asks how much of personhood is yours alone. How much of you can be an imitation, a hand-me-down, a parting gift.
Mama
by Nay Assassa
I can’t place this thought,
where it came from and who put it here. Skin can stretch and split
but this image spreads It spills, seeps and candies
my eyelids as I dream.
In my sleep I’ve been wading towards it until my body gives. when it can’t stretch and so splits,
I crack my eyes open. In the mornings this thought pinches.
I can see now finally now
that when this face begins
to sag, my cheeks will sink and look just like yours. Where do I stop and you begin?
I’ve already grown into your nose.
Your friends tell me time and time.
They miss you through me.
Talking at my face like it doesn't belong to me wasn’t mine to begin with That we share it somehow. That if I offer my face to their words
you might hear them, these are your ears and your eyes.
Did you leave this thought for me? I try to pick myself out in my stubborn chin, my thicker brows.
I can’t. Not anymore. I don’t want to.
Now that we can’t smush these faces
together stare in a mirror smile with those same stretched lips.
My sister tries to find you in stupid things.
Your jewelry, a wedding dress a dusty camera filled with frames of you.
The thought you’ve left us with,
This first inheritance,
Is still sowed deep, frozen
in the pale expanse of our fathers features.
I drift along in clean waters,
our reflection everywhere,
and it feels good to know
that I can live this other lifetime with you. (as you?) In one of your last dreams your eyes blinked open and you called out to me with your name. Me my own mother and you now yours.
Twinned in this tender way.
But now in my dreams the
tide flows in quickly, Years and months and days.
I can’t find new ways to keep hold of this link.
Everything we share I
carry with me already. Where do you stop and I begin?
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